Other retailers, including Merry-Go-Round Enterprises and McCrory Corp., are still trying to come out of bankruptcy while chains such as Kmart Corp. and Charming Shoppes Inc. are tightening their belts to stay solvent.

Most already have or eventually will close stores.

There's so much business that some liquidators are teaming up to cope with the load.

"They're so darn busy that nobody could do it by themselves," Edison Brothers chief financial officer David Cooper said of his company's plans to close 473 stores.

Retailers turn to liquidators because they usually buy surplus inventory upfront. That gives a retailer a chunk of cash immediately that otherwise would trickle in over several months.

Boston-based Gordon Brothers Partners Inc. paid Jamesway more than $100 million for its inventory in one of the largest such transactions this year. That allowed the discount retailer to concentrate on repaying its credit line and selling its real estate.

Liquidators also let retailers focus on surviving.

Kmart spokeswoman Mary Lorencz said the discount retailer has used liquidators to close 214 stores since September 1994.

"That's their expertise and it frees up our field management team to do what they do best, which is running the stores which are open," she said.

As helpful as liquidators are, they don't win popularity contests in the rag trade, Millstein says.

"They've always been perceived as the undertakers," he says. "Nobody has ever been pleased to have to dial their phone."

Liquidators, in turn, are a tad defensive about their grim-reaper reputation.

"We don't cause these companies to have problems," said Alan Cohen, who heads New York-based Alco Capital Group Inc.

If anything, the liquidators say, they can help solve them.

"It used to be that you liquidated because you screwed up," said Gordon Brothers President Robert Sager. "Now, it has to do with a changing circumstance."

He argues that store closings are inevitable in an industry struggling to deal with intensifying competition, shifting tastes and changing demographics.

Gordon Brothers expects to liquidate $2 billion in inventory this year, double the amount of last year and up from only about $10 million when Sager joined the company 10 years ago.

Cohen and Sager say their business has plenty of risks, much of it hinging on selling merchandise fast.

"You've got just 60 to 90 days to move the goods," Sager said. "If you fail, there's no next quarter."

Sager won't disclose how much he and his two co-owners make, only that "it translates into a very nice business."

His three biggest competitors, Alco Capital, Nassi Bernstein Co. and Jay L. Schottenstein, are similarly coy about their results.